A Note on Your Discomfort
“One could make a case for mutual lust and jealousy as the basis for racial conflict in America.”
—Price M. Cobbs and William H. Grier, Black Rage
This might hurt. This could prod open regrets and secrets and what you find could be shock. But there’s nothing in Slave Play that part of you doesn’t already know. The setting: a plantation. Time: irrelevant. Lights up on a Black woman working. Before I saw it, all anyone would “give away” was that Slave Play would resonate with me—as a Black woman and particularly as someone who’s tried to post-coitally tell a White lover that when we have sex, there’s a blip wherein I suddenly inhabit an ancestor’s body, and he the body of a pale, pilfering master. Whiteness was difficult for my lover to hear about and mid-thrust ancestral abduction perhaps incomprehensible, but it got said. Pain can be useful once it’s off our chests, even funny. This aching humor is a Black necessity and art form Slave Play deftly exercises and exploits. There’s a gun in the first act—it’s a big black dildo. The cock of the gun is a long Black memory. Illuminating, uncomfortable, but plain as lust. Totally varied in our levels of comprehending the general materiality of Black America, my audience laughed, gasped, and sucked our teeth unsynchronized. “We’re Saying Language but really dealing with power,” the poet June Jordan said. We’re saying aggression but dealing with desire; shame but really ancestral memory. We’re saying sex but meaning ownership. The astoundingly sharp Jeremy O. Harris, through scrupulously observed and sardonically genuine characters, has created a work purely innovative, queering, and blue-blackening conflict, plot, even its title. Slave Play is a radical study in American memory: the psychologies of the prized and of the oppressed; the grateful and the entitled; who’s top, who’s bottom; who speaks, who can’t, and who betta listen.
—Morgan Parker
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. Her latest collection Magical Negro was published in 2021 to much acclaim. Her debut young adult novel, Who Put This Song On? was published by Delacorte Press in September 2019.
SLAVE PLAY RESOURCES
A list of articles, films, and books to help you understand Slave Play from a historical context.
ESSAYS
“Venus in Two Acts.” Saidiya Hartman, Small Axe, 2008.
Hartman maps out the systemic violence visited upon the bodies and memories of enslaved Black women and girls.
“White Fragility.” Robin DiAngelo, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 2011.
The author examines the effect that even mild amounts of race-based stress can have on Whites in our insulated environment.
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Hortense J. Spillers, Diacritics, 1987.
One of the most-cited works in African-American literary studies, this landmark essay draws connections between the structures of the Black family that were created during slavery, and the ways in which they have manifested into contemporary familial phenomenons.
“Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” José Esteban Muñoz, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2006.
Latina affect, the performativity of race, and the depressive position.
“Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” Fred Moten, South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013.
In this important treatise from the renowned poet and critical theorist, Moten examines Afro-pessimism and the work of mid-20th-century political philosopher Frantz Fanon.
FILMS
Slaves (1969)
Set in the 1850s South, the film follows Cassy and Luke, two Black slaves who are sold to the sadistic plantation owner MacKay, who wants labor from the men and sex from the women.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul(1974)
The film revolves around the romance that develops between Emmi, an elderly German woman, and Ali, a Moroccan migrant worker in post-World War II Germany.
Mandingo (1975)
An exploitation film depicting the brutality of chattel slavery and the sexual fetishism of Black bodies by the White establishment.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
The concept of sexual experimentation as couples' therapy is given an early examination in this 1969 comedy.
12 Years A Slave(2013)
Director Steve McQueen's Academy Award-winning tale of a Northern free Black man kidnapped and sold into chattel slavery.
Bamboozled (2000)
Spike Lee's satirical update on the minstrel tale and depiction of Black culture created for White consumption.
Faces (1968)
Director John Cassavetes' blistering take on the dissolution of a marriage.
White Material (2009)
The tale of a White French farmer in Africa caught in the middle of a bloody civil war.
BOOKS
Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Elizabeth Able, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, Eds., 1997.
A landmark collaboration between African-American and White feminists.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Carol Anderson, 2016.
Acclaimed historian Carol Anderson chronicles the powerful forces opposed to Black progress in America.
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985. James Baldwin, 1985
Both an autobiography and an intellectual history of the twentieth-century American experience.
Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Ed., 2011
This book depicts popular culture as a crucial arena in which African Americans struggled to secure a foothold as masters of their own representation and architects of the nation's emerging consumer society.
Intercultural Couples: Crossing Boundaries, Negotiating Difference. Jill M. Bystydzienski, 2011.
A rare and comprehensive understanding of intercultural couples, drawing mainly upon in-depth interviews.
Between the World and Me. Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015.
This epistolary memoir illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage. Soyica Diggs Colbert, 2011.
The study examines African American plays past and present, demonstrating how African American dramatists stage Black performances in their plays as acts of recuperation and restoration.
The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in The United States. Joan Ferrante and Prince Brown, Jr., 2000.
A groundbreaking collection of classic and cutting-edge sociological research that gives special attention to the social construction of race and ethnicity in the United States.
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Saidiya V. Hartman, 1997.
This work examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. Saidiya Hartman, 2019.
This book recreates the experience of young urban Black women who desired an existence other than that of domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty.
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Ibram X. Kendi, 2016.
This deeply researched and fast-moving narrative chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Katherine McKittrick, 2006.
Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by Black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade.
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Philip D. Morgan, 1998.
This historical work provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Toni Morrison, 1992.
The acclaimed writer shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a Black population that was manifestly unfree — and that came to serve White authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography. Jennifer C. Nash, 2014.
Nash creates a new Black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions — between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation — at the heart of Black pleasures.
Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. Tavia Nyong’o, 2018.
A recent work that argues for a conception of Black cultural life that exceeds post-Blackness and conditions of loss.
Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Christina Sharpe, 2010.
The author interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address racialized sexual violence and its repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity.
Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, Eds., 2007.
This book argues that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses.
Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism. Shannon Sullivan, 2014.
Sullivan untangles the complex relationships between class and race in contemporary white identity.
Intercultural Couples: Exploring Diversity in Intimate Relationships. Terri A. Karis and Kyle D. Killian, Eds., 2008.
Highlighting both the struggles and successes of couples, this book challenges the principle of homogamy, helping the reader gain a deeper understanding and respect for intercultural couples.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Christina Sharpe, 2016.
Sharpe blends personal experience with artistic representations of Black life, using multiple meanings of "wake" to illustrate the ways Black lives are determined by slavery's afterlives.
Black & Blur (Consent Not to be Single Being). Fred Moten, 2017.
"A brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for Blackness as a category of analysis." - Brent Hayes Edwards